There are many situations when a property such as homes, apartments, condominiums, cottages, bungalows, rooms, automobiles, recreational vehicles, boats, yachts, motorcycles, cruise ship rooms, etc. are rented. Likewise, certain services such as carrier airlines (e.g., they rent a seat), buses, shuttle services, limousines and the like and have similar characteristics to rental properties and have similar problems when rented.
The problem is that some renters are not as conscientious as they should be. Yes, most renters try hard to leave the property in the same or better shape than it was when they arrived. Unfortunately, the few renters that don't result in massive combined expenses on the part of the landlords for repairs, replacement and lost rentals during outages. Some potential problems resulting from bad renters are missing items (towels, furniture, silverware, etc.), broken items (TVs, radios, lamps), damage to structure (holes in walls, burn marks from cigarettes, etc.), catastrophic loss (fire, flood caused by renter) and violation of rules/laws (loud noise, smoking where prohibited, more than allowed number of guests, etc.).
If a landlord has an easy-to-use system to warn them of prior histories and problems with certain renters, that landlord can avoid renting to those with less than stellar histories, thereby potentially avoiding the expenses associated with the above list. Alternately, the landlord can request extra deposit money in the form of cash to cover potential damages. Unfortunately, such as system is not currently available.
U.S. Pat. Publication No. 2003/0093289 to Thornley, et al, describes a system for reporting and collecting rent payment history. The described system collects some information regarding leases (long term rentals), but provides only raw data for each rental and does not collect feedback from the prior landlords in a way that is useful in determining whether or not to rent to an individual, company or group.
What is needed is a system that will collect rental data including feedback and optional images and provide a quick assay of past rentals as a way of protecting landlords from potentially bad renters.